Einstein@Home scheduler logs available on-line

To help new and old users, admins and troubleshooters to debug problems with their BOINC installation and with BOINC, I have put the (sanatized) Einstein@Home scheduler logs onto the following web page http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/sched_logs/ where they may be viewed. This can be very helpful to understand (for example) why a particular host machine is not getting any work.

Please use this thread to make suggestions about improving this system, or to ask questions about how to interpret the information in the scheduler logs.

The logs are organized by HOUR, with one directory per hour. Within each hour are sixty log files, one for each minute. I did this because otherwise the files would be too large for practical use.

To compare these scheduler-side logs with the BOINC client logs on your host machines, please remember that the timestamps on the scheduler logs are in the Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) time-zone. You will have to shift these by your computer's offset from UTC to compare timestamps.

In doing this comparison, you may want to set your computers time with high-precision (for example by using the Network Time Protocol, or NTP). This should allow you to make comparisons to within a few milliseconds.

The scripts that I have written will maintain the last week of scheduler logs on the web in real time. For technical reasons they are created after a 3 minute delay. Note that since multiple instances of the BOINC scheduler run simultaneously, the times in the logs may not increase monotonically.

Generally you will want to search though the logs for the records corresponding to your computer. The best way is to use your browser's FIND tool to locate the text [HOST#XXXXX] where XXXXXX is the number of your host. You can find this number on the 'Your computers' page.

Bruce Allen